Question

I have an app where a user can input text in a textarea. I then use that to match against a large block of text to extract whatever the user entered in the textarea if found.

Problem is, if that textarea includes a | pipe, the it stops at the pipe:

Example:

User Input: This is my entry, I should all be remove | thank you very kindly

Larger block of text: blah blah blah blah blah This is my entry, I should all be remove | thank you very kindly

Desired return is: blah blah blah blah blah

But what I get back is:

bad: blah blah blah blah blah | thank you very kindly

The regex works like so:

desired = larger_block_of_text.sub(/#{user_input}/m, '').strip

Ideas? Thank you

Answer 1

You can use Regexp.quote(user_input) to escape the special characters in the regular expression so that they are treated literally.

Note: If you just want to find a constant string you don’t need regular expressions. You can instead use a String instead of a regular expression as the argument to sub.

desired = larger_block_of_text.sub(user_input, '').strip